Shared modular GMP facilities for academic personalised vaccines and cell products
Personalised cancer vaccines and cell therapies need a factory for each patient. Shared, automated production units serving many academic hospitals would let universities run these trials without building their own plants.
Regional facilities with closed, automated, modular manufacturing (mRNA and peptide neoantigen vaccines, autologous CAR-T and TIL, dendritic cell products) offering slots to academic trials at cost, with common release testing, digital batch records and a shared quality management system accepted by regulators. Modelled on the UK's Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult manufacturing centre and CIRM's Alpha Clinics, but explicitly for oncology personalised therapies where academic groups hold the biology but cannot manufacture. Coupled with the hospital-exemption registry and public CAR-T network, this is the manufacturing layer of an academic personalised-therapy system.
- The valley of death between lab and product · Most academic discoveries die before anyone tests them in people because nobody funds the middle step.
- Manufacturing cost and time for living and radioactive medicines · Cell therapies take weeks to make for one patient and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isotopes run short.